The House Oversight Committee says it has scheduled a hearing on UFOs for next week that will "explore firsthand accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena" and "shed some light" on what the federal government thinks about them.
The hearing on Capitol Hill set for Wednesday, July 26, comes after David Charles Grusch, a decorated Air Force veteran and one of three people who will testify, claimed the existence of a secret government program he said has been recovering crashed UFOs and reverse engineering their technology. The Department of Defense has disputed his claim.
"We’re bringing in credible witnesses who can provide public testimony because the American people deserve the truth. We’re done with the cover-ups," Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said in a statement.
The hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," will examine "firsthand accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena and assess the federal government’s transparency and accountability regarding UAPs’ possible threats to U.S. national security.
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UAPs is an acronym the government uses instead of UFOs.
"This hearing will also highlight legislative efforts to bring transparency to UAPs and require the federal government to provide the American people with information about potential risks to public safety and national security," the committee said.
"The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades, and we’re finally going to shed some light on it," Burchett added.
Scheduled to speak alongside Grusch is Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, and retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor.
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Grusch told NewsNation in June the government is "retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed.
"Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed … sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true," Grusch said.
But Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, told Fox News Digital there is no "verifiable information to substantiate the claims."
Gough is the spokesperson for the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a section of the DOD tasked with investigating and identifying UAPs.
"To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently," Gough said.
Fox News’ Chris Eberhart contributed to this report.
